


A Day in the Life

by Canon_Is_Relative



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Curses, Episode: s04e17 It's a Terrible Life, Love Triangles, M/M, Pining, Shameless misappropriation of Beatles lyrics and Shakespeare and Arthurian and biblical character, arthur/Guinevere/lancelot - Freeform, arthurian legends, myths, of sorts, smith And Wesson investigate, spn_springfling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-19
Updated: 2018-04-19
Packaged: 2019-04-24 21:48:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14364396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canon_Is_Relative/pseuds/Canon_Is_Relative
Summary: Sam and Dean Winchester work a case that seems to revolve around a curse dating back to the time of Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere. So do Sam Wesson and Dean Smith.





	A Day in the Life

**Author's Note:**

> Epic thanks to my beta, stardust_made, and to the mods who run the supernatural springfling challenge, I enjoy it more with every year. And to cassiopeia7, for providing such delightful prompts.

_I read the news today, oh boy_

 

“You’re not Sir Galahad and I ain’t no Guinevere, so get with the program, dude!”

“You don’t even know who Galahad is,” Sam said without looking up. The manuscript was unspeakably beautiful, despite the way the ink had faded and the gold leaf flaked off the vellum with every turn of the page.

“Uh, duh, he was one of the Holy Grail knights. And screw you, anyway, why’d you have to go and read that out loud?”

Sam finally looked up at his brother, laughing. “Dude, if every ancient text contained a curse or an invocation, I think there’d be a lot more dead guys in chainmail clanking around. Anyway, I’m not even sure that’s what it means, it’s a little vague. ‘By Galahad’s purity shall be invoked...’ blah blah blah... ‘the Doom of Guinevere.’”

Dean harrumphed and stalked around the cramped space for another minute, finally coming to hover over Sam’s shoulder until he gave in and looked up to see exactly what he expected to see; his brother’s petulant-and-long-suffering-while-still-manly pout. Only Dean, seriously.

“Okay, so what do you want to do?”

Dean rubbed the back of his neck. “We’re getting mold poisoning just breathing in here, I swear. Let’s come back tomorrow in daylight, I don’t like poking around here like thieves when the dude’s ghost is coming after the people treating his collection like garbage.”

Sam looked around the mildewed storage unit, empathy for the poor departed scholar welling up in his chest. “All right,” he said, closing the book and scrunching his nose against a cloud of dust. “Let’s go.”

“That’s such a load of crap,” Dean said in the car, eyes on the road. “Cursing people to repeat history.”

Sam shrugged. “Almost every culture has some version of the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot story. The doomed love triangle, I mean. I read this study once at Stanford that—”

“Okay, Romeo, cliff notes please.”

Sam bit the inside of his cheek and refrained from asking Dean what he thought about the whole Juliet-Romeo-Mercutio thing. 

===

Lying in bed that night, Sam listened to his brother’s breath even into that of deep sleep and then let himself loosen his own hold on thoughts, feelings, impulses...He felt his heart immediately pick up speed and spared a moment to marvel at his own self-control.

_How is this awkward? Let me count the ways..._

This job, it was just striking too close to home, that was all. Still, Sam cursed himself for giving in to the impulse and reading that passage aloud. He wasn’t sure what Galahad had to do with it but going over the language again now it seemed clear that if it was a spell, it was designed to invoke the energy of the famously doomed Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot entanglement and in the middle of a sleepless night, Sam found it all too easy to cast himself and Dean as a two-man act holding down a three-person play; brothers like Arthur and Lancelot, partners like Arthur and Guinevere, and lovers like ... well, like two people whose love, should it transgress those neat categories, promised certain ruination.

Jess had been fascinated by Guinevere, Sam remembered, and deeply sympathetic to her as well. History may remember her as the Yoko Ono of the Round Table but Jessica saw her as a person burdened with an impossible choice. ‘Is the greater tragedy that Arthur and Lancelot once loved each other like brothers, or that Guinevere truly loved both of them?’

Sam would have kissed his brother a long time ago if he hadn’t known to his bones that it would upset the delicate and age-old balance of their very existence. There were days, though, when Sam was ready to swear that Dean knew what was there between them just as well as Sam did; moments when his treacherous imagination whispered to him that Dean wanted him just as much...

Of course, Sam also wondered if Jesus and Judas were lovers, and whether it was Mary Magdalene or Simon-called-Peter who’d come between them, so he was the first to say that his imagination was more than a little out of bounds.

 

_Woke up, fell out of bed_

 

“Well I don’t think we have to worry about that, anyway.”

“Oh yeah?” Dean looked up from his inspection of the cracked old manuscript. “Why’s that?”

“Because you are not Galahad and I am definitely not Guinevere, dude.”

Dean pushed himself up from his crouch, grinning, eyes sparkling; the same expression that had been messing with the relative positions of Sam’s heart and his throat ever since he first saw it – hard to believe that was only a couple of weeks ago. Sam had been covered in blood, then, Dean dazed from a head wound and answering, ‘Right?’ to Sam’s declaration: ‘That was amazing.’ 

Right?

It had been right. It had felt absolutely right. 

And now here they were, searching through the dank, moldy storage unit containing the worldly remains of an avid book collector who maybe wasn’t ‘resting in peace’ so much as ‘scaring the daylights out of every beneficiary of his last will and testament’. 

“Did you just call me ‘dude’?” Dean swung his flashlight up to shine right in Sam’s face.

“Dude!” Sam threw a hand up to shield his eyes. “Yeah, so? Is it a problem?”

“No,” Dean said in that tone that Sam was pretty sure meant ‘maybe,’ but as he blinked he could see that Dean was still smiling. “No one’s called me ‘dude’ since the tenth grade.”

Sam blinked again, but by the time he’d made up his mind to ask, Dean had clamped his flashlight between his chin and his shoulder and was looking down at the manuscript again. Stepping closer, Sam could see that it wasn’t so much _old_ as it was _ancient_ , the letters inked onto the thick paper in rich but fading colors, some of them lined with gold. 

“I’m telling you, Sam, Latin was my best subject in high school, and this is _definitely_ invoking some sort of curse around the Guinevere archetype. My only question is, what’s a book about Arthurian magic doing rotting in a storage container?”

“Right,” Sam smiled, and struck his best Harrison Ford pose. “‘It belongs in a museum!’ Oh, come on...Indiana Jones?”

Dean’s blank expression cleared up. “Oh! Right. Sorry, never seen it.”

“You — what? Oh my god, dude,” Sam said with slight emphasis. “Movie night, tonight, I’m serious. _And_ you’re going to have a beer.”

***

It was Sam’s tenth day of freedom. Ten days since he’d, ah, given his notice at Sandover. It felt like so much longer, like everything that had come before was a bad dream, to the point where he kept forgetting the name of the company that had almost owned his soul. The first time that happened he’d settled triumphantly on ‘Stanford,’ before remembering that was actually Dean Smith’s Alma Matter. That was a painful memory; four days into his liberation and Dean hadn’t returned his calls, leaving Sam first convinced that Dean had chickened out on their deal and then wondering if he’d misunderstood and there had never been a deal at all. 

After wasting the ghost of old man San-whatsit, Sam had all but bared his soul, telling Dean, ‘I know you.’ He’d scared himself — and Dean, obviously — with the intensity of his conviction but he’d never been more certain of anything in his life. Dean had told him to leave, and two hours later called his cell to ask if Sam was gonna go through with it — ‘it’ being the whole whacko plan of quitting and hunting monsters without health insurance — even if Dean didn’t. When Sam bluffed and said yes Dean had said all right, then they’d have to meet up afterwards to compare stories. It had taken Dean five days to get in touch after that and when he did, comparing and sharing hadn’t been his agenda. Sam wasn’t about to look it in the mouth, though, not when the gift Dean came bearing was a list of people two towns over all reporting the same eerie phenomena. All of them connected, however tenuously, to a recently deceased medieval historian and collector.

‘Nice work, Dean! This is awesome!’

‘I know, right?’

And just like that, nothing that had come before even needed to be mentioned.

They’d stayed late at Dean’s apartment that night and when Sam started talking about going home, Dean insisted on driving him. Sam tried every dodge in the book to get out of it but Dean was just a good guy, the kind of guy who’d never had to learn when a friend was giving you the ‘I don’t want you to see my home’ vibes; the kind of guy who’d always lived so far on the right side of the tracks he’d never known there was anything on the other side.

To his credit, though, when Sam said, ‘Just drop me here,’ and Dean asked if he was sure because there was nothing but motels on this street, it had only taken a glance at Sam’s face for him to turn the car around. The Prius was so silent that Sam could hear each time Dean drew breath to speak before he finally found the words to tell Sam that they could get his stuff tomorrow and he had an extra toothbrush in the guest room. 

Sam hated the extended stay motel he’d landed in. He hated the town more, though, and so the thought of signing a lease had turned from insult to injury in about a week and he’d put up with the fleatrap as a matter of pride.

Dean, as it turned out, hated his high-rise apartment. He didn’t like being that far off the ground, didn’t like floor-to-ceiling windows, and thought all the chrome in the kitchen made it look like a home for a robot. ‘Well, if the cyber-shoe fits,’ Sam had quipped. It was possible that he wasn’t as over the five days of silence as he’d been pretending.

Another five days on, though, and Sam got to his borrowed key first and held the door for Dean like he’d been doing it for years. He dropped his bag on the floor and then the two of them laid out what they’d taken from the storage unit before splitting up to wash up and change. 

Sam emerged first, dressed in sweats and a USMC shirt he’d found in the guest room closet that Dean claimed he’d never seen before. He pulled up _Last Crusade_ on Dean’s Amazon Prime account before deciding it was too on the nose and clicking over to _Raiders_ instead and opening two beers.

“So what happened in tenth grade?” He asked once Dean had settled beside him and was giving the beer a long-suffering look.

“Excuse me?”

“You said earlier that no one had called you ‘dude’ since the tenth grade and it didn’t seem like a date you just pulled out of your hat.”

Dean picked up the beer and examined the label, finally taking a sip like a conquistador accepting to break bread with the natives, and then turning native himself and glugging the rest of it before Sam had drawn another breath. 

“That was the year I came out.” 

“Of what?” Sam asked, following the words with a vivid mental image of shoving them back into his mouth as Dean gave him a withering look. “But that day in the elevator, you said—“

“You ever heard the expression, ‘don’t shit where you eat’? I have a policy, I don’t date coworkers.”

Dean’s outburst was as crass as it was disingenuous and it pissed Sam off. 

“Sure, that’s a good policy, especially when you’re a big-shot in a pretentious company where no one knows you’re a—“

“A what, Sam?” He might have been speaking to the beer; it seemed to be holding his attention more than Sam had ever done.

“Sorry.” Sam laced his fingers together between his knees, staring down at them. “That was shitty, I’m sorry.”

“This really what you want to watch?” Dean was staring at the Indiana Jones menu. Sam had heard the theme song so many times he’d completely tuned it out, forgot that was why they were sitting here with their knees almost bumping. “Shouldn’t we be, you know, researching?”

Sam groaned, and before he could think better of it moved to knock his knee against Dean’s. Dean didn’t pull away, and it felt as solid as the eye contact they held when Sam finally dared to look up at him.

“Do you think there’s really a curse?” Dean licked his lips when Sam didn’t reply. “Do you think I might have actually cursed us when I read that?”

Sam shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe? It seems dumb to make any sort of assumptions anymore, now that...”

“...anything seems possible.”

“Literally, anything.”

“Right?” Dean was shaking his head with the beginning of a grin, awe tinged with disbelief, and Sam wondered if it would be a curse or a blessing to be locked in this man’s star-crossed orbit for eternity.

 

_Somebody spoke and I went into a dream_

 

There was music playing nearby. Could Dean have put music on — on what? — or could they be hearing it from the next apartment over, the next motel room? Sam was caught in a loop trying to remember where they were and trying to identify the song and trying to comprehend that it was the sound of his own labored breathing filling up the room.

“Sam,” Dean murmured between presses of his lips against the bare skin of Sam’s belly.

“Don’t,” Sam gasped, and opened his eyes to see Dean’s headlit-deer expression. “Ticklish, dude.”

Dean huffed a laugh, pressing his face to Sam’s chest, a beautiful bright blush racing over his pale skin. Sam reached down and ran his hands at last over those strong shoulders. He let himself feel everything, greedy and terrified.

“Dean.” Sam could barely make out the sound of his own voice. “Dean, wait. Why…?” He had to be sure.

Dean pushed himself up, eyes roaming Sam’s face, pupils blown and lips parted. “It’s not a curse, I swear to you. Ever since…”

Sam sucked in a breath. He didn’t want to hear that ‘since,’ couldn’t bear the comparison game when he himself couldn’t rightly distinguish between ‘forever’ and ‘two weeks ago.’

Dean just gazed down at him. “Sammy, it’s real.”

Sam surged up and held his face between his hands. “Don’t call me Sammy,” he breathed, then kissed him.

Time collapsed like a broken telescope and Sam allowed himself to live within these handful of moments, boundless and eternal.

=*=

Dean was right; it wasn’t a curse. They’d never been cursed but in the way of people looking for a disease to prove their symptoms, the humdrum around them had seemed to snap into focus, slotting them into a sort of cosmic pattern with all signs pointing to that ancient magic.

They laid the old man’s spirit to rest, promising as they lit the match to take care of his collection, locking eyes across the blaze and waiting to feel it all start to fade.

Only it wasn’t a curse. It was life, built on one moment and the next, until it was as if nothing had ever come before and they were the only two people who’d ever felt this way.

That night, after salads and steaks — Dean protesting only nominally — Sam lay down his fork with a sigh and looked out the window. He could see the car, gleaming across the parking lot, and felt an unfamiliar tug behind his navel. It wasn’t a call to run away; it was, for once, a call to stay.

“Hey, Dean?” Dean looked up, ready to smile, and Sam felt himself start to grin. “You feel like watching Monty Python tonight?”

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoy my writing, I'd be thrilled if you'd take a minute to check out my original fiction. My first novel, 'Portrait of a Stranger,' is a sweet story of three chance encounters, two boys, and first love. Co-written with my fic-writing partner stardust_made, it will be released on December 26, 2018. You can order it [HERE](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KVLWHF6/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1543166018&sr=1-1&keywords=Portrait+of+a+Stranger).
> 
> The first few chapters are available to read [here on our blog](https://leboncanon.wordpress.com/). We appreciate the support of our fellow fanpeople!


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